Weyerhaeuser, by way of its iLevel brand, has been broadcasting the construction of a new house in Reedley, CA live over the Web.
Quick background: In northwestern Ontario’s stretch of boreal forest, Weyerhaeuser owns and operates a major mill which obtains wood from the traditional territory of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. The community has not consented to logging on their territory and has backed a moratorium but lacks the ability to enforce it.
So we sent two our finest out to Weyerhaeuser’s construction site to use a bit of their own technology against them. Annie and Adrian found the site yesterday and deployed a large banner reading “Wake up Weyerhaeuser; American Dream Home, Native Nightmare” directly in front of the company’s auotmated webcam.
Ten minutes later, the image made it to Weyerhaeuser’s site.
But why stop there?
Back at home base, we noticed a great feature of the site, an archive:
But it’s password protected:
Luckily, our folks are a bit smarter than their folks:
So, thanks to some carelessness in the realm of online security and picking a really simple password, our activists got inside their site and into the webcam controls:
And we could do fun stuff like zoom the camera:
Cool, we have control of the camera and Weyerhaeuser is inadvertently broadcasting our message out on their site. But we wanted to make sure to get their attention a little more directly.
Once again, thanks to its own fancy system, the company made it pretty easy for us to use the web cam’s administrative tools to email the images directly to the executives at Weyerhaeuser and the iLevel team:
“Thanks for the web cam setup! Native rights now!–RAN”
I’m pretty sure just about the last thing the people at Weyerhaeuser expected in their inboxes today was a giant picture of RAN activists sent by the company’s own PR technology.
So good job to the team who braved the heat to get the banner out. I think they brought just a little more unexpected pressure yesterday.
Check out all the pictures on our Flickr site!
Oh, and if you’d like the username and password for the site, just email: takeaction@ran.org